Publications

This comparative Handbook provides a pioneering and comprehensive account of regulatory impact assessment – the main instrument used by governments and regulators to appraise the likely effects of their policy proposals. Renowned international scholars and practitioners describe the substance of impact assessment, situating it in its proper theoretical traditions and scrutinizing its usage across countries, policy sectors, and policy instruments. The Handbook of Regulatory Impact Assessment will undoubtedly be of great value to practitioners and also scholars with its wealth of detail and lessons to be learned.

Can the European regulatory state be managed? The European Union (EU) and its Member States have looked at Better Regulation as a possible answer to this difficult question. This emerging public policy presents conceptual challenges to scholars of public management and administrative reforms, but also opportunities. In this conceptual article, we start from the problems created by the value-laden discourse used by policy- makers in this area, and provide a definition and a framework that are suitable for empirical/explanatory research. We then show how public administration scholars could usefully bring Better Regulation into their research agendas. To be more specific, we situate Better Regulation in the context of the academic debates on the New Public Management, the political control of bureaucracies, evidence-based policy, and the regulatory state in Europe

Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) has emerged on the European political agenda. It is an idea whose time has come. Both the member states and the institutions of the European Union (EU) are presently investing in programmes for ‘better regulation’ and ‘good regulatory governance’. RIA is the cornerstone of these programmes. This paper explains how RIA is being diffused in Europe. Is the introduction of RIA in Europe simply the diffusion of an idea, the content of which remains very different in the various national contexts? Or, alternatively, has the diffusion of ideas brought about convergence at the level of how RIA is performed? As shown by Hahn and Litan (2004), European impact assessments are often different from North-American RIAs. This paper shows that the adoption of a common RIA ‘bottle’ has not produced similar European ‘wines’. The language of RIA has produced a community of discourse for policy-makers and has stimulated the introduction of some instruments that are similarly labelled ‘impact assessment’. But RIA practice may exist only on paper, and in some cases the ‘RIA label’ may reveal basic assessments of administrative burdens. The paper explains how ideas can be diffused without convergence of results. The argument here is not the trivial one that ‘context matters’, but how it matters. Hence the paper breaks down ‘context’ into four dimensions, that is, institutions, models of the policy process, actors, and legitimacy. Institutional design, the capacity to deal with distributional problems, heterogeneity in multi-level governance systems, policy styles, and the ‘weights’ given to the preferences of different RIA actors explain the lack of convergence.